Originally Posted by Torque


Thats an interesting critique of Pillars and is probably one reason why I like it alot more than Pillars 2. You are just a normie travelling down the road and you piece by piece discover more things about yourself. The fact that there is no clear goal is to the strenght of the game, not detriment. There is a mystery and you are aware there is a bigger picture but you dont care because you're having so much fun exploring the world. Its probably why BG1 resonates so well with me too. The prologue is basically: "myserious bad guy wants to get you" and what do you do with this information? Fuck man, just go east and talk some friends of your father, perhaps go into the woods to the south? Dunno, there is some troubles with kobolds in the mine to the south maybe you want to check that out.

The story reveals the importance of the main character piece by piece. You can probably ignore 95% of the content in BG1 and still complete the game. Perfect storytelling for computer games in my opinion.


I generally agree that the approach PoE took to storytelling was great, I do love that it wasn't super linear and more about discovery and exploring the world to uncover what's happening, I just think that in the beginning that introduction could have been tighter. It drops you into theyou world, you lear you're going ot Gilded Vale and then suddenly you're left to wander the woods and can potentially come across your first sidequest in an area that's just a patch of woods. I'd probably have made it so the player goes straight from the tutorial area to Gilded Vale, just to tighten that up a bit. In general I'd have streamlined everything leading up to you discovering that you're a Watcher, then let everything continue as normal. I think that giving the player a bit more of a sense of purpose early on before openning things up would have made for a more cohesive beginning.

And bringing this back to BG3, the ending we're presented, where we start off having a clear, firm goal-escape the Mindflayers ship-and then being faced with the fullness of the world and our freedom to explore it after that, feels like it'll make for a stronger beginning.